Economic History Titles

The Lessons of the South Sea Financial Hysteria Remain Unlearned Since 1720

The lessons of financial bubbles and their inevitable consequences could be discerned almost three centuries ago, in 1720. Paul Strathern here relates the story of London’s South Sea Bubble, the first great financial hysteria, whose characteristics appear all too familiar today.

The Industrial Revolution Remakes England and Creates a Proletariat&nbsp;
Selections from The Condition of the Working Class in England

Among the profusion of books and pamphlets and inquiries throughout Western Europe in the mid-19th century that addressed the condition of the working class under the new industrialism, Engels’ book, based on firsthand observation and on other available sources, stood out. Today it remains, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, “the first large-scale attempt to apply the Marxist method to the concrete study of society . . . [and] by far the best single book on the working class of the period.”